


Stay with Me

by Anonymississippi



Series: I'm Not Gonna Write You a Love Song [1]
Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: Angst, Codependency, F/F, Survivor's Narrative
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-25
Updated: 2014-12-14
Packaged: 2018-02-26 23:03:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2669678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anonymississippi/pseuds/Anonymississippi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This ain't love, it's clear to see.</p>
<p>But darling, stay with me.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I don't want you to leave, will you hold my hand?

Silas burned slowly.

Like coals prodded hourly for warmth, flares erupted at random provocations. Every few minutes a seasonal breeze whooshed by and flames surged, then fell, then settled back into their smoldering ruminations. The crater of ash where the Administration building once stood smoked the most, grayish motes of brick and timber rising like snow flurries in opposition to gravity. Leftover shreds of building and flesh shot upwards like geyser streams in monochromatic columns, but nothing stirred beneath the ash embankments; nothing, save freshly decimated souls.

Danny Lawrence rubbed the oval callous on her middle finger as the first rays of sunlight crept over the horizon. The skin wasn’t as rough as it had been at the finals for the Silas archery tournament last spring. Instead, her finger felt slimy and bumpy, her knuckles and dead skin cells painted over in bloodied perspiration. Her bowstring and the notches of several retrieved arrows were crimson-stained, slippery as a slick of oil in a parking lot. She held her bow at the ready as she made yet another silent sweep of the perimeter, eyes casting about for more wounded, for more deceased.

The triage of casualties would take all morning, and though her sympathies were with the wounded, her heart was with the dead.

She lost three of her sisters last night.

An acquaintance.

Something close to a brother.

And Laura.

She lost Laura.

Danny checked in with Marley at the slap-dash medical tent the Zetas and Summer Soc girls had thrown together on the Quad in the early morning hours. The pre-med and nursing students bandaged up superficial wounds while the paramedics loaded the more grievously injured into Styrian ambulances. The dull _thud_ of doors slamming cast a wave of nausea over Danny’s extended frame; she barely made it to the bushes near the sidewalk before pitching forward, vomiting her stomach contents in a steamy puddle of stench and sick.

She hacked, and gagged, and crouched for a long time, hiding in the bushes, before she felt composed enough to walk across campus.

To Laura’s dorm.

To Laura’s room.

For vengeance.

* * *

 

_Anything happens to her, I’m coming back here with that stake, you got it?_

 

* * *

 

 "Get up.”

Carmilla lay in her bed clutching Laura’s yellow pillow, eye sockets colored the dull mauve of burst capillaries. As Danny shuffled closer in the dawning light, she noticed the sunken orbits weren’t black from actual bruising, but from Carmilla’s smeared eyeliner.

Turns out vampires do cry.

Danny wondered if they could bleed.

“I said get up.”

“Go away.”

“Get the fuck up, Carmilla.”

“Get the fuck out, Danny.”

“Make me,” Danny seethed.

In a haze of limbs and rage she stooped and tore the leopard-print sheets from Carmilla’s body. The bed lurched when the undersides of the sheets came untucked from the lumpy dorm mattress, but Carmilla didn’t move. Next went the pillow, a cushiony bouquet of daffodils, which Danny seized with tremulous hands and a fissured heart.

She chucked it to the opposite side of the room where it banked against the wall and plopped, benign and bright, onto Laura’s empty bed.

Carmilla twitched at the loss of the pillow, but otherwise gave no indication that Danny had stormed into her sanctuary and disrupted her mourning.

 _Fuck that_ , Danny thought.

The lacey black fabric ripped when Danny yanked Carmilla up by her shirt. The vampire didn’t struggle, but allowed herself to hang, limp as a rag doll, six inches off the floor in Danny’s iron grip. Vindictive blue eyes stared down and dared her, begged her, challenged her, but Carmilla didn’t retaliate. Danny shook with the effort of holding her, maybe a hundred pounds of undead, pale skin and dark hair. Danny shook with rage, too, with sadness, and shook Carmilla in turn, so hard that her immortal little neck snapped back with a force that would have at least paralyzed a human, at most killed them.

If tonight had proven anything it was that Carmilla was definitely, regretfully, not human.

“Fight me,” Danny breathed.

“Go away, Danny.”

“No!” Danny shouted, and threw Carmilla to the ground. She planted with her left and swung her right backwards, landing a combat boot in the squishy concave of Carmilla’s abdomen. The immortal flinched again, but didn’t move to stand.

“Say something!”

“What do you want me to say, Gingersnap? Because, really,” Carmilla mumbled with insincerity, “the main thing on my mind right now is making _you_ feel better.”

“I—”

The stake holstered at her hip rubbed angrily against her abdomen, tiny splinters embedded in rough skin. Danny’s head fell forward. Even in her fatigued slump, she still towered over the being in torn black clothes on the floor, curling in on herself at the base of the wardrobe.

Danny couldn’t say what she wanted, but she knew what she didn’t want.

Danny didn’t want to have to reroute her morning jogs to make way for crime scene tape and arson investigations. She didn’t want reporters showing up, singling her and her sisters out for teary interviews, now that Emmet and Monique and Elsie were dead. She didn’t want Perry catatonic, savagely scrubbing at nonexistent stains (“…so when LaFontaine comes back, everything will be nice and clean for them. They’re _coming_ back. I just have to get some of this shrapnel out of the way. LaFontaine’s _coming_ back.”). Danny didn’t want to study, didn’t want to teach, didn’t want to help decorate for the end-of-term formal, and especially didn’t want to attend the six or seven funerals sure to take place over the coming days.

“Come on, Buffy,” the dark lump muttered below her, nudging her stinging leg. “What do you want?”

Danny had taken a blow to the knee after she’d broken rank and ran directly at Will. Her system had flooded with venomous satisfaction when she’d plunged the stake into his thoracic cavity, twisted, and watched his body disintegrate in a sandstorm of oblivion. She’d never forget the gratification, the rush of brutal achievement.

She’d also never forget her despair at watching Will, with that sly grin and those muscled forearms, snap Kirsch’s neck right in front of her.

Kirsch had asked her to the formal after her fight with Laura (“C’mon, Summer Psychbro, I’ll be your wingman.”). She’d said yes, stipulating that he’d have to keep his fratastic levels set to low if he intended to leave the dance still mobile. After a good-natured exchange of threats, Kirsch had even agreed to cook for them.

Kirsch died five hours ago.

“Hey, fire crotch,” Carmilla seethed, maneuvering slowly to her feet. “Even my patience has limits.”

“Fire crotch?” Danny ran a nervous hand through hair matted with blood. “That one’s not even clever.”

“Forgive me, I’ve had a rough night.”

“Yeah, mine was a fucking cake walk, Dead Girl.”

“Awe, is that the term of endearment you use for your sisters now? I’m touched.”

Danny slapped her. And just as Carmilla’s tongue darted forward to lick a trickle of red from her thin lips, Danny slapped her again. With the other hand. Twice.

“You… you did this,” Danny murmured, as tears blurred the edges of her vision into a tunneled scope of hatred.

She’d been momentarily stunted, trying to figure out what she wanted, why she’d really come here. Danny needed… an explanation, or an apology, or—she didn’t know what. Her friends were dead and Laura was dead and Danny wanted Carmilla dead, too.

“It wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t shown up, right?” Carmilla led, and pushed Danny hard enough to have her stumbling back into the middle of the dorm room. “I killed your friends, and I killed Laura, and now, I’m going to kill you, too.”

Danny drew the stake like a six-shooter and crouched defensively. Not that it helped much. She didn’t even see the punch that rattled the molars in her jawbone. A sudden _crack_ sounded, and Danny wondered briefly if her ribcage could be crushed like a walnut shell. There was pain, Danny thought, from sparring sessions and weight lifting and post-cardio soreness… and then there was _agony_.

Books and decorative knick-knacks were dislodged in the ensuing skirmish; Carmilla kicked wide and knocked a pink candle in a glass onto the hardwood floor. The enraged pair grappled over wax and wick and shards as they tore the room to bits. The shelves above the beds collapsed in on themselves like imploded buildings; the desks and their contents clattered to the ground when Danny snapped Carmilla’s arm against the supporting furniture leg; the bed frames squeaked and stuttered as the women tumbled and thrashed against them, battling for position. The forlorn owl lamp atop Laura’s shelf shattered into tiny bits of plaster.

Somewhere around the eighth punch-kick combo, the stake clattered to the ground, useless.

“Isn’t this what you wanted?” Carmilla taunted, and elbowed Danny in the gut. “A monster to fight?”

Danny doubled-over, gasping, but flung her arms outward on the descent and tackled Carmilla in the process. She sat heavily on the vampire’s hips and rained punches at Carmilla’s face, her shoulders, her chest, every exposed bit of porcelain skin. Blood poured from her broken knuckles and her wrist throbbed and she felt nothing except _pain_ ; but Danny didn’t let up, for she wanted the vampire bruised and sore and broken _._ Danny panted and sobbed with the effort, adrenaline fueling her strikes. Carmilla’s head lolled to the side, and Danny used the momentary distraction to scrabble about for the lost stake. Danny straddled the vampire to hold her down, wrapped shaky red fingers around the shaft of the stake, and raised it above her head.

Carmilla craned her neck upwards, her face smeared with Danny’s blood.

She didn’t move.

Neither did Danny.

“Please,” Carmilla whispered, tears mingling with the spattered red drops on her cheekbones. “Please, do it.”

Danny quaked, splintering slivers of wood grinding into open flesh wounds on her hands.

She wanted to kill her. To watch her fade out of existence like Laura and the other victims had, at the center of that damned devouring light. She desired to shove her whittled weapon to the left side of Carmilla’s sternum and stab and stab and keep stabbing until the woman below her was nothing more than ash on the wind.

But there was already so much ash blanketing the campus, so many dead and broken and mourning. Adding another to the body count would serve no purpose.

Danny whelped as she dropped the stake to the side and sat back on her knees, covering her head in her aching hands.

“No!” Carmilla shot up and snatched the discarded stake with lightning speed. She took Danny’s broken hand and made Danny hold the stake, pointed it at her own chest and _pressed_. “The one thing you’re good for and you can’t follow-through?! Kill me!”

“I can’t,” Danny shook her head, and tried to struggle against Carmilla’s grip on her stinging wrist. “I won’t.”

Her hand was swollen large as a grapefruit, and streaks of intense pain pulsed around the mangled joints at her wrist; likely sprained, possibly broken.

“Please,” Carmilla begged, small and sad and pathetic. “Clear your conscience, I’m asking for it.”

“That’s why you fought back… you wanted me to—to—to rage against you?” Convulsions wracked Danny’s body, and her breath came in gasping hiccups.

“She’s dead, Danny! I loved her and I failed her and she’s never coming back, so please, just…” Carmilla took Danny’s other hand, gentle as a lover, and wrapped it around the base of the stake. “It would be a mercy.”

“I’m—I’m, n-n-not doing this,” Danny shucked Carmilla’s grip from her hands and scrambled off of the girl, rising on unsteady feet. She winced when she grabbed the bed frame to help pull herself up, and blanched at the pool of blood she left in her wake. “I thought I c-could, that you deserved this… and you d-d-do, but, I can’t—I can’t be the one to do it.”

“Danny!”

“No, I’m leaving. Kill yourself without my help, I just… I can’t.”

“No, wait, Danny—”

“I’m done, Carmilla! I have to make it through the end of this semester and then…” Danny raised her hands and backed away, backed out, retreated from the most haunted dorm room on the entire campus. “I won’t be able to forget all the shit I’ve done if I kill you, too. Forgetting's the only way I’ll make it through all this without blowing my own brains out.”

“You think you can forget?!” Carmilla spat. “You think it’ll be that easy? You’ll remember killing everyday of your life, even if you don’t finish me off.”

“I can justify those actions,” Danny rebutted. “… with a shit-ton of therapy.”

“You know you killed my brother, right?” Carmilla hissed, struggling to her feet.

“He killed my brother.”

“Please,” Carmilla huffed. “My family is gone. My mother was insane, but she cared for me. She loved me with a possessive passion unparalleled in the mortal world, and you ended her as well. That’s what you do, Gingersnap. You kill monsters, so why can’t you finish the job!”

Danny rolled her shoulders, the aches from the overnight siege taking root in the muscles of her back, rippling down her spine. She inhaled and exhaled through her nose, aiming for composure and falling woefully short. She didn’t want to think about what kept her from staking Carmilla, whether it was Carmilla herself or something deeper, something inexplicable yet noteworthy in Danny’s character that stopped her from killing someone who _wanted_ death… someone who thought death was a deserved and proper recourse. Someone who wore an expression of stricken misery and sorrow identical to her own.

“Because you didn’t kill Laura,” Danny said. “And you didn’t kill my sisters. And you didn’t kill Kirsch. You’re no hero, but you’re not a monster, either. Laura wouldn’t love a monster.”

Carmilla wept openly now, bitterly, centuries of tears and loss and trauma on a face blushed with blood.

“And I know you’ll just kill yourself in the end,” Danny finished, turning. “Goodbye, Carmilla.”

“Wait!” Carmilla lunged toward her, grabbing her injured hand before she passed into the hallway.

“Ahhh!” Danny shrunk away, cradling her wrist. “What? What now? Let me leave!”

“No, I…” Carmilla sniffed and swiped her tears away with a black-tipped finger. “Will you stay?” she mumbled, so softly Danny almost misheard her.

“Why?” Danny asked, bewildered and tired.

So, so tired.

“I…”

Danny waited for Carmilla to formulate an answer, reluctant lips and articulators coming together to produce words and logic. But Carmilla couldn’t look at her, couldn’t speak to her, so Danny sighed and tried to retreat again.

“No, please.”

“Why, Carmilla?” Danny repeated, completely lost. “You… hate me.”

“I don’t have anyone left,” she spoke through clenched teeth, and ran a hand through scraggley black waves. “Just… we don’t have to talk, or even fucking look at each other, but stay. You’re… I think you’re the only person out there like me. The only one who thinks they could’ve done more. Should’ve done more. And now…” Carmilla put her head in her hand, wiped grit and tears from the inside corners of her eye sockets.

“I’m going to fall asleep,” Danny said. “And I need to see a doctor.”

“Take Laura’s bed. She would’ve… she wouldn’t have minded.”

“Who are you to speak for her?” Danny accused. The thought of resting in Laura’s bed seemed irreverent and disrespectful. The wounds were too raw.

“Take mine.”

“No,” Danny said, convicted, and shut the door to the room. Drying towels swung into place from the hooks hanging on the back of the door, one still damp from the previous evening’s use. The same towel Laura had lent her to get that disgusting salted herring out of her hair. Danny fell back against the wardrobe and sank down, down, down into her grief. “I’m here. I’m staying. But not for you.”

“Yes… okay.”

Danny bent her gimpy knee up and placed her uninjured elbow on top of it, propping her head in the hand that hurt the least. She heard Carmilla stalking back and forth, but didn’t bother opening her eyes until she felt the sudden cool from the ice pack.

“Here.”

“Hmm.”

Carmilla shuffled back and forth for a few more moments before dropping down to the floor beside Danny, her back to the wardrobe. She lifted Danny’s injured hand and readjusted the ice pack, wiped the majority of fresh blood from her palm and fingers, and then placed it atop Laura’s yellow pillow. Danny watched Carmilla bring a bottle of something to her mouth and swallow, chug after rancorous chug of alcohol forced down her ivory throat.

“You want some?”

“Yeah.”

Danny took the bottle and drank, not as much as Carmilla, but enough to churn her stomach and dull the pain in her hand momentarily. She passed it back over and waited for sleep to take her. Carmilla drank and cried beside her, and Danny hated her. Danny hated herself.

She had only ever wanted to help people, to protect people… and how had it devolved into this? Danny reached across the pillow with her uninjured hand and grabbed Carmilla’s twitching fingers. She bit down, _hard_ , when she turned her bloody wrist over and held Carmilla’s shaking hand in her own.

“Danny—”

“Don’t. Just—don’t, okay. Let’s just… let’s be sad. If there was anything else to do I would be doing it but right now let’s just… grieve, alright?”

“Okay.”

…

…

…

“I still hate you,” Danny spoke to the air in front of her.

“Ditto, Gingersnap.”

Danny squeezed her hand.

“And isn’t that sad.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And deep down I know this never works.
> 
> But you can lay with me so it doesn't hurt.

Bizarrely enough, Laura’s funeral didn’t break the Ginger Giant.

LaF’s did.

Carmilla watched Danny from a distance, svelte and solemn in her black pantsuit and heeled boots. She sobbed into a tissue Perry had distributed prior to the graveside service. Mother Perry, in her quest for perfection, had taken solace in the planning, and threw herself into every detail of her dearest friend’s memorial, from the heartfelt eulogy to the open casket. LaFontaine had looked pale and peaceful, ready for eternity with a syringe in their crossed hands.

As far as funerals went… it had been perfect.

It was even drizzling. Like Perry had ordered the sky to lament with them, and the clouds (in fear of Lola Perry’s wrath) had acquiesced with a poetic sort of grief.

Laura hadn’t been given the benefit of an open casket. Or even a casket at all. She’d flung herself headfirst (as was her fashion) into an exploding light before either Carmilla or Danny could stop her. And she’d taken down Mother and Will and the rest of Carmilla’s family, but hadn’t been able to save the taken girls, or the handful of Zetas and Summer Soc members embroiled in ferocious battle with the Dean’s army of undead.

She’d done it.

Hero.

Martyr.

Fool.

Beloved.

And left Carmilla with… and left Carmilla.

Carmilla noticed movement at the graveside, a hysterical Danny rising from the collapsible chairs and denying offered comforts from a series of outstretched hands. The Summer Sister was definitely a specimen as far as humans went, exemplary even, standing head and shoulders above the congregation huddled beneath the flapping green tent. She strode across the gravel of the cemetery with lumbering steps, limping and sniffling like the victim of some unspoken horror. The rocks underfoot crunched as she plowed on, paying little heed to the vampire offering her respects behind the walls of the mausoleum filled with Latin engravings and stone angels.

“Ginge—Danny,” Carmilla called, slipping down from her perch.

Danny stopped short and jerked toward Carmilla’s hiding place, skittish as a squirrel.

“Camilla? Is that you?”

“Unfortunately.”

“I thought you…” Danny tucked dull, limp hair behind her ears and coughed. Her eyes were bloodshot and her face gaunt, dappled with injuries and the heavy look of survivor’s guilt. Carmilla wondered when Danny had last showered. “I honestly thought you’d be dead by now.”

“Well, not for lack of trying,” Carmilla mumbled.

Danny reached out, as if possessed, then seemed to come to her senses and dropped her hand before any contact could be made. She squinted her eyes as more tears welled and dripped, darkening storm-blue irises and a mutilated face.

“You look like shit,” Carmilla said.

“Yeah,” Danny agreed. A sad half-smile grew, but the crooked, pinkish lips clashed with scratches, olive bruises, and a deranged pallor. “Can’t argue with you on that one. Got into a fight with this mega-bitch a few days ago.”

“Looks like you got your ass handed to you.”

“I can’t very well use the ‘you should see the other guy’ argument in this instance,” Danny shrugged. Her face upturned, she studied Carmilla with the scrutiny of a physician. Or maybe a mortician, looking for abrasions to cover, marks to erase. But Carmilla never exhibited outward signs of trauma, no matter how hard the world struck her.

“I hit you so hard and you didn’t even bruise,” Danny murmured.

“Yes, well… it’s apt, I suppose,” Carmilla said wistfully. “What I’m able to withstand, and endure, with this unwavering constitution. Pain touches my kind, yet never marks us. It’s an invisible immunity of sorts. Whereas your much-too-fallible human nature—” it was Carmilla’s turn to reach out, to lift the sleeve of Danny’s blazer and run two fingers over the convoluted straps and cinches holding the nude brace tightly in place. “—you are susceptible to outward manifestations of physical abuse. But your benefit, your power, in all of this… you do get to heal. Your bruises will fade and your scratches will scab, and you’ll get to watch it all wither away into memory.”

“You have no memory of pain?”

“I remember pain… loss. What it feels like, sometimes. But hurt? Discomfort? Physical pain is…” Carmilla waved a hand and broke her shifty gaze with the taller girl. “… fleeting. It’s like a mosquito bite, I guess. An annoyance. Triviality. Even when I want to—no… _deserve_ the pain, because I’d—I’d—I’d like to know what it’s like to feel and… heal, for once.”

“I’m so tired of hurting,” Danny confessed. “I hurt everywhere, all the time. It’s taking an obscene amount of effort to stand and speak, and my jaw is numb from that sucker punch you threw.”

Danny brushed split knuckles over a mottled bruise blossoming over the lower left side of her face. A thin, irate slice ran at a diagonal angle down her cheekbone, turning her features sharper, Elven, practically inhuman. Carmilla sensed a strange camaraderie with this formidable mortal, and inched closer.

“You wish to stop feeling?” she asked.

“… yes,” Danny breathed, and swiped again at the edges of her eyes with the remaining scraps of the damp tissue.

“I think I could… be of some assistance,” Camilla continued cryptically, and yet… if Danny indeed desired forgetting, perhaps the suggestion wouldn’t come across as vague as Carmilla’s phrasing implied.

“And you want to… hurt, then? To feel pain—”

“I want to feel anything, at this point,” Carmilla redirected, avoiding eye contact with steely resolve. “But I could… help you forget.”

Carmilla stepped closer, as she had with dozens of other girls. She ran a hand up and down the length of Danny’s arm, drizzling mist cloying in the atmosphere of the graveyard. She placed her hand on Danny’s hip but the girl sidestepped, flinching away from the contact.

“This wouldn’t mean we’re—”

“This means nothing,” Carmilla clarified her intentions.

“Just that we’re both hurting, and desperate enough for something destructive,” Danny answered feebly.

“Don’t you think we’ve endured the worst of it? That any further course of action would seem inconsequential in the shadow of—of—of Laura’s death? I can’t seem to… that is, I’m not…” Carmilla pulled her leather jacket tighter about her chilled frame, and finally met Danny’s eyes in the process. The interest was there, but shrouded and overrun by suspicion and incredulity and all-consuming guilt. But Carmilla pressed on. Excluding her years interred in a bloodied box, she had consistently been surrounded. By Papa. And then Maman. Elle. Various roommates. Then Laura. But… but now?

For the first time in her centuries of living, she had no one. No lover or master or guardian or friend. She was terrified.

“I’m not through grieving just yet,” Carmilla whispered.

“But isn’t there, I mean, we can’t just—”

“Don’t over think it, Red.”

“But there’s like… an element of betrayal that I can’t shake—”

“Please spare me your reservations of betraying the dead. Take it from someone who knows, it’s hard to hurt the feelings of a person you’ll never see again,” Carmilla hissed.

“You’re despicable.”

“But you’re coming with me anyway, aren’t you?”

Danny crossed her arms over her torso and fiddled with the shiny button of her jacket. Her shoulders jittered in place from the dank chill of the water-logged atmosphere, but her overall carriage still possessed a strength of life that Carmilla recognized as stubborn, stupid humanity. The vampire thanked the constellations, the only divine beings she cared to acknowledge, for the reliable bull-headedness of the world’s inhabitants. She thanked them for Danny, and cursed them for Laura.

“Yes, I’m coming with you,” Danny said.

“Okay.”

…

…

…

“Okay.”

 

* * *

 

“Stop,” Carmilla commanded.

Danny looked up, her twitching fingers curled awkwardly around the buttons of her jacket. She’d craned her wrist into an acute angle of vexing stiffness, struggling to undo the fastenings of her funeral suit. Her horned rimmed glasses had fogged at the abrupt shift from outdoor, humid air, to the snugness of her own single room in the Summer Soc house.

“You’re hurting yourself,” Carmilla explained, sidling closer and taking Danny’s hands in her own. She guided them down to the sides of Danny’s body, fingertips trailing over broken skin. “The point was to avoid such discomfort.”

“The funeral, and you… and this,” Danny choked out, eyes heavy-lidded and downcast. “It’s all a blur.”

“Because your spectacles have gone foggy,” Carmilla replied, taking the frames from Danny’s face. She ran her index finger on the underside of the lens, following the curvature. It provided Danny with some form of clarity, this visual correction. Making everything sharper, when the situation presented was too dull and confusing to figure without the barrier of glass and plastic between action and intake.

“I didn’t know you wore glasses.”

“I usually don’t unless I'm grading, or reading… contacts for running, and games and stuff.”

“Hmmph.”

“But I knew I’d be crying a lot today. I couldn’t deal with another… irritant.”

“I commend your foresight.”

“This whole thing could have been avoided if I’d gone with my gut. Foresight proved futile.”

Foresight. As if knowledge could have prevented an assurance. No matter what scenario played out, Death was a certainty. A promise. The only variation was Death’s chosen prize, the who, not the why. The mitigating factors, the details, any one variable could shift the entire outcome two spaces to the right, and the king would fall (or the Queen, in this case) but the number of casualties: the pawns; the handful of knights, like the red Knight in shambles in this tiny room, injured and melancholy in the vampire’s presence; the number of rooks and bishops lost in the perpetual give-and-take of supernatural battle… unavoidable. Preordained, by centuries of cyclical, perfected abductions.

Had Carmilla arrived a second earlier, everyone would be living, save for her. Another second too late, and the half-woman sulking before her would have joined her friends in their respective urns and sepulchers, her remains crushed underneath the grimy poundage of soil and unrealized dreams.

And in another universe: the one in a million chance where they all walked away. Battle-weary but breathing, they told heroic stories of action by lifting the sequins and satin of their formal dresses to compare their scars from the struggle. Yet another option from the list of possible outcomes was consummate defeat. Death for all, save Maman, or brother mine, William. And then there’d be no reason for this introspection, for this twisted version of comfort she sought with Danny.

But in this reality, in this universe, Carmilla flicked open the topmost button of Danny’s blazer with wordless concentration and worked her way down. She reached for the lapels and worked the garment off Danny’s shoulders, mindful of the bunching tightness at the right wrist as she tugged the sleeve over the brace on the overgrown Gingersnap’s forearm.

The bruises had worsened with two day's time. The imprints and scratches of demonic, clawed fingers tattooed the exposed skin of Danny’s forearms and biceps, blotching aches disappearing under the grey cap sleeves dangling off her shoulders. Carmilla moved to undo the buttons of the undershirt.

Had she had color in her face to begin with, she would have blanched at the sight she found there.

Danny’s torso was mutilated. Someone (or something) in the basement of the Lustig had sunk their talons into her flesh and _ripped_. The track of parallel scars running over her abdomen hurdled jaggedly upwards the farther north Carmilla’s gaze traveled. Her ribs were a swollen hump of flesh, likely cracked if not broken. But the damned Xena wannabe and her own bastardized version of bravado had stood so tall, so elegant in her state of bereavement as she passed from apse to sanctuary of church after church, from graveside to mausoleum to memorial.

Carmilla couldn't even tell how badly she'd been hurting.

And despite Carmilla’s honed cynicism, sympathy swelled to a crescendo as her hands hovered over the maimed skin.

“Danny—”

“Will,” Danny said, cradling her wrist against herself. “Then this was another bloodsuck—another one on their side,” Danny ran her hand over the left side of her face.

The red hair and the green bruising reminded Carmilla of archaic Yuletide celebrations, the intertwined holly berries and brown-green fir needles bent with forceful exactitude to create wreaths and boughs for holiday decoration. It had been back when she recalled the vestiges of delicate humanity, back when the peasantry reveled for countless evenings and she had remained removed, observing from the gothic windows of the schloss. When she had been saddened and resentful, another exclusion from experience that never touched her person. Like the bruises and the soreness, simple celebrations were beneath her.

“The Dean,” Danny said spitefully, indicating the mass of disturbed swelling on her abdomen. Taking advantage of Carmilla’s momentary shock, Danny twisted the button of her slacks open and tugged the material over her left hip, exposing a puffed, bruising laceration. It looked as if someone had attempted to tear her hip from her leg, like they were trying to forcibly remove the limb from the ball socket joint and hammer her into the ground with her own body part.

“You,” Danny breathed, and Carmilla shattered.

She stepped into Danny to rest her head against a chest of black-and-blue, and flinched when she settled tentative hands onto Danny’s hips.

“It felt like… it felt familiar, when they were pounding on me,” Danny confessed, ruffling the hair at the crown of Carmilla’s head. Carmilla felt arms envelope her, secure her in this enclosed stance. “I’ve faced that type of fight before, fighting to win, fighting dirty. But with you, when I stormed into Laura’s room…”

Carmilla couldn’t remember the aftermath, only that she’d wanted Laura and nothing more.

“It felt like you were tearing me apart so you could put her back together.”

Carmilla slumped under the weight of the accusation. Danny was smart, loathe as Carmilla was to admit it. Danny had taken her own reckless actions and juxtaposed them with Carmilla’s sudden desperation, the danger and volatility that accumulated in her state of ineffectual frustration.

“And I think you would have ripped me apart,” Danny plowed on, just like she always did, when Carmilla wanted nothing more than for her to _stop talking_. “I know you certainly could have, hurt as I was. But you didn’t. You stopped. You wanted me to end you instead, but I couldn’t. And you couldn’t either. So what does that make us?”

“Impotent cowards,” Carmilla sneered.

“Yes,” Danny said. She extracted herself from the embrace, and winced as she bent at the waist to settle on the side of her mattress. Her sheets and spread were a spectrum of violets and greens, bold and befitting a Summer Soc leader. Danny unzipped her boots, removed her slacks, and moved back to sit against the wall.

Carmilla sat on the edge of the mattress and removed her shirt, bereft and puzzled by Danny’s questions, by her acceptance of this proposal.

The vampire had requested feeling... something… something more physical, inconsequential (like any number of nameless study buddies), not this emotional codswallop currently roiling in the recesses of her chest cavity. To remember the pain, to make herself _hurt_ … the way humans hurt, piqued and scathing for nanoseconds, until adrenaline and requisite progress forced them to move on and _deal_. She wanted that physicality, and if Danny wouldn’t give it to her in carnal proceedings she might be forced to slug the woman in the face again.

Too bad looking at Danny felt like a punch. Or… what she imagined a punch would feel like.

_Fuck this_.

Carmilla crawled over the sheets and nestled herself against Danny’s side, tossing her frizzied waves over her shoulder. She placed her mouth on Danny’s bruised shoulder and kissed the welt, feather-light and meaningless.

“I don’t want to do this anymore,” Danny whispered.

“Huh?” Carmilla asked, and then, more substantially: “Wait, what the hell?”

“This is wrong. This isn’t… this isn’t what I need. It’s wrong to do this to you.”

“Last I checked, Xena, you haven’t laid a finger on me, now stop talking and please get to work.”

Carmilla tucked her hand into Danny’s hair and mashed their faces together, mouths conjoining in sloppy reciprocation, half-hearted attempts at discontinuing on both sides. Danny’s lips did move and Carmilla’s tongue did invade but it felt wrong, felt incorrect, felt uncomfortable, felt disturbing, because they were both thinking of a dead girl they’d never get to kiss. Carmilla broke the world’s most guilt-laden lip-lock and backed away slightly. Something was off. She felt—she _felt_.

It was insurmountable horror.

She dove back in and latched onto Danny’s neck, disregarding the bruises. Back to the old game. Back to stoicism. Back, back, back... and her fangs grew pointy in an instant. Danny yelped and began to struggle.

“Stop,” Danny breathed, attempting to wrangle herself out of Carmilla’s grasp.

“Make me,” Carmilla said, and slid a hand up along the inside of Danny’s bruised leg.

“Carmilla,” Danny gasped, and forcibly tore the vampire's mouth from her neck. Danny shifted so that she was facing Carmilla, a vampiric head held in her broken, human hands, swimming blues staring straight into dark eyes. “I’m not her, and you were so in love with her.”

“Stop—”

“I cared so much for her, I could have loved her, but she wouldn’t want this.”

“Don’t tell me what she would’ve wanted,” Carmilla hissed. “She would’ve wanted to live. She would’ve wanted to go back to that damned camera and edited footage and eaten cookies and watched those campy science fiction stories on her computer—”

“That’s not true and you know it,” Danny accused, tears dripping over her chin. “She would’ve wanted to win. She would’ve wanted to win, at the expense of her life. And we did. We won.”

“This isn’t an accomplishment,” Carmilla said.

“This certainly isn’t,” Danny agreed, an obvious reference to their half-naked state. “I can’t do this because it feels wrong for her. Feels wrong for me. It feels wrong because it _feels_. We were the ones who were in on this with her from the start. We… I can’t forget who you are to her, because by some weird, transitive association, you mean something to me because she meant something to me. I don’t want a throw-away fuck because I can’t get my shit together and stop crying, okay?”

Carmilla wrenched her head from Danny’s grip but didn’t falter at Danny’s hiss of pain. She rolled forward and climbed off the bed, searching for her discarded shirt.

“What are you doing?”

“What does it look like, Gingersnap? You can’t give me what I want, I’ll find someone who can.”

“You can’t fuck your way out of feeling, Carmilla.”

“Ah, see that’s where you’re wrong. I don’t feel anything when I’m screwing some starry-eyed cupcake. It’s why I asked you in the first place.”

“Is that also why you hesitated? Why you pulled back? Or did you stop because you got what you wanted, what you asked me for in the cemetery? You did feel something.”

“Don’t flatter yourself, Red.”

“God dammit, not—” Danny shook her head, then turned toward the shelf that doubled as her head board. She fumbled about for her meds and stuck the pill bottle between her knees in order to turn the child-proof cap with her uninjured hand.

Carmilla admired her stubbornness.

Danny dry-swallowed two pain pills and ran a hand through her hair.

“You’re running away because you feel something. Not… for me,” Danny explained. “But… I think we feel the same.”

“Please, enlighten me as to my own emotions. I’m sure you and your two decades of existence are comparable to my three-hundred plus years of experience.”

“I think you and I are the only two people in this world who think we could’ve done more, but didn’t. Like what you said in Laura's... in your dorm room, when we were fighting. It's... you can't be with me because you know exactly how I feel. And I can't be with you because I know how you feel. How whatever we do now... whether it's what classes we take or who we fuck or where we decide to live... it doesn't matter. I know that deep down, we both want something, but not _this_.”

Carmilla opened her mouth to protest, then shut it just as quickly. She had no defense against the statement. She propped indignant fists on her hips and shifted her weight from foot to foot, unable to look at Danny. The woman was bruised from head to toe. Hurting all over. Heart-sick. And Carmilla was… just as heart-sick.

Maybe they were more alike than she thought.

“We were too late,” Carmilla said. “Or… sad that we didn’t act, when we knew we should have,” she finished, projecting her own woes onto Danny.

“Exactly,” Danny nodded, and brought a hand up to clutch at her stinging abdomen.

“So what does that change?” Carmilla asked, stooping to pick up her shirt. “So we feel the same, we let her down, and now we get to live with our incompetency and powerlessness for the rest of our lives. Your guilt will last, hmph, significantly less longer than my own.” Carmilla turned and shook her head.

“Wait!”

“God, what, Danny?!”

“Stay with me.”

…

…

…

“But you just said—”

“I know what I said. I don’t want that from you,” Danny amended, attempting to rise from the bed.

“No,” Carmilla shuffled over and put a hand on her shoulder, pressing the woman back into the comforts of the mattress. “You’ll only do yourself more damage if you don’t take time to heal.”

“Then stay with me. Heal _with_ me. The bruises don’t matter, I just need someone who… who knows what I’m going through.”

“Fuck, you want to _cuddle_? I expected more from you, Lawrence.”

“Well, you’ll give a girl her weaknesses when half a dozen of her closest friends just died,” Danny bit back.

“I knew you were in there somewhere, under all the blubbering,” Carmilla snarked, shoulders sinking in resigned fatigue.

She petted Danny on the head fondly, reveling in the irony, in the tiniest sliver of mournful fellowship. Wouldn’t it be so like the universe, random and unforgiving as it tends to be… to have the pair of them destined to draw comfort from each other? Perhaps sympathy, and with it, sentiment, wasn’t completely overrated. Carmilla could at least acknowledge the benefits of friendship, the desire for affectionate comfort as opposed to passionate, forgetful exchanges. It was… something she would have to get used to.

“Move over,” Carmilla said, and Danny did.

“Take those boots off before you get in my bed,” Danny instructed.

“Screw you.”

“You certainly tried.”

Carmilla took her boots off and snuck under the covers with her nemesis-turned… something.

They lay face-to-face in Danny’s extended bed, cramped and stiff and burdened by unwieldy emotions. Danny’s eyelids would droop and then pop open, like when a monotone prof was delivering the most boring lecture on the earth. The fluttering lids might have been attractive to Carmilla in another life, had the woman’s face not been evidence of her own failures.

“I wish you’d stop looking at me like it’s your fault,” Danny said.

“I’m not.”

“Liar.”

“Softy.”

“It’s not, you know,” Danny said. “I fought, and I’d fight again. And I’d fight harder.”

…

…

…

“You fought very admirably,” Carmilla whispered.

“You did, too,” Danny said, though the sentimentality was lost with the yawn that followed. “Sorry, pain pills make me drowsy.”

“How badly does it hurt?” Carmilla chanced to ask.

Danny shifted again, closer, and reached for Carmilla’s hand under the covers. She just rested it there, overtop knuckles that weren’t split, fingers that weren’t scratched, skin that wasn’t marred. She didn’t make any promises or interlock their digits or even squeeze it this time, but Carmilla could feel the intention in the touch. That the tangible action meant… something. Something she nor Danny could dare to identify at the moment, but a something inarguably mutual.

“It hurts just as much as you do,” Danny tried, articulating more with tone than with words. “Because even if you can’t show it, if there’s no marks… it doesn’t mean you can’t feel the pain. And it hurts me, a little, to see you like that. I can’t hate you when I’m feeling sorry for you.”

“It’s admittedly hard to hate you when you look like a soldier that survived Normandy. Believe me, I’ve seen a few.”

“That must've been terrible.”

“Not exactly a walk in the park.”

“I probably could've learned a lot from you,” Danny said, though her lucidity seemed compromised between the drugs and the oncoming sleep. “You know, if you weren’t such an asshole.”

“Good to know your vulnerability hasn’t changed what you really think of me,” Carmilla said. She snuggled closer to Danny, closer to warm sheets and warm breath and a warm, beating heart that was still so beautifully alive.

“I don’t hate you,” Danny confessed, drifting off.

“I don’t hate you, either.”

…

…

…

“It’s a start, Gingersnap,” Carmilla said. She pressed her lips to Danny’s forehead, and thought that maybe Laura would’ve smiled at the action. “Definitely a start."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This has some serious BrOTP potential, y'all.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Oh, won't you stay with me? / 'Cause you're all I need / This ain't love it's clear to see / But darling, stay with me.

The trumpet trio sounded squelchy and stale, all circumstance without the pomp. The graduating class looked more like soldiers than students, grim and colorless and forbearing, their worsted robes drifting in the static air of the commencement procession. The students crossed the Quad to the stage on the north end, the gaping, rocky crater behind it obscured for the moment by curtains and a podium and a line of professors and department heads outfitted in their ceremonial regalia.

Carmilla sat atop the engineering building on the east side, cataloging the lumpy terrain and the new tufts of grass threatening to overtake the remaining scorch marks of destruction.

The administration building had collapsed six months ago.

Their classmates, their friends, their peers, hell, even the head of their campus, had died six months ago.

This class, this handful of graduates… they were the remainder.

Her eyes found Perry, fidgeting in one of the collapsible chairs set up for the audience on the outskirts of the Quad. The curlicues on the tense ginger’s head bounced right and left with every sharp snap of her neck, providing the effect of some erratic strawberry anemone, shoved every which way with the pull of an indecisive current. She held a camera too big for her hands, ancient, probably on loan from the library. But Perry didn’t snap, didn’t put anything into frame; her focus never settled for more than a moment before she twisted and began scanning a new quadrant of black-garbed graduates.

Apparently, she couldn’t find what—who, she was looking for.

Neither could Carmilla.

She should be here, probably at the front. Gingersnap, for all of her flaws, was intelligent. One didn’t receive a teaching assistantship on good looks alone. And the honors grads always filed in at the front of the procession. Carmilla knew this, had seen this, year after year after decade after decade. Summa and magna cum laude honorees always sat at the front with their colored stoles and braided cords denoting advancements in scholarship, in service and ethics. But Danny…

Where the hell was she?

Carmilla mimicked Perry’s movements, sporadic rotations of the head, sharp vision honing into focus and then breaking, because _that one’s too short_ or _the posture’s all wrong_ or, _the hair’s closer to auburn than to burnt cedar._

It wasn’t the first time she’d looked for Danny in the last few months.

Carmilla started checking in randomly at the beginning of the second semester. The remaining Zetas, the Alchemy Club, the Summer Soc House, even Perry’s dorm room. Just to make sure. To make sure of what, well—

She felt an odd sense of… nothing like duty, or obligation, not like it had been under mother’s scratching, blistering thumb. There was nothing—no one, tying her to Silas, tightening that noose of commitment that had rubbed her neck raw for years on end. And yet she lingered, for reasons unknown, or at least reasons repressed. Amongst the gargoyles and pigeon shit on the rooftops of lecture halls and dormitories she stood sentinel, waiting on the next unholy terror to rouse itself from underneath campus sidewalks. For all its stressors and dangers Silas was startlingly close to _home_. A reluctant constant, at least for the past three quarters of a century, as the borders of Styria proper grew smaller and smaller with Europe’s piecemeal land division.

And really, where else could she go?

Coupled with the haunted geographic constant of the tiny university was the ever-susceptible student population, and among that population lived Danny Lawrence. Stake or javelin in hand and on patrol, most nights after the battle; and then most nights turned into every night, wandering campus grounds and venturing into doorways clearly marked with a skull and crossbones or the archaic serif font warning off ‘all ye who dare to enter here’. Carmilla flit stories above her, not so much back-up as an amused third party, observant and intrigued despite her usual disaffectedness.

In those few months of aloof companionship, Carmilla studied Danny.

Danny’s metamorphosis occurred slowly, so slowly that Carmilla hadn’t realized the shift until she stood face-to-face with the woman under a stone archway on an April dawning, dew-damp and backlit from the solar break against the eastern horizon.

Danny had… changed.

Not enough that Carmilla could name it, the alteration, the distinctive shift from before to after. Perhaps the battle, for all Danny’s posturing, had done a bigger number on the redhead than she cared to admit. Carmilla watched, but Danny didn’t walk slower; she didn’t slump, or even stand taller; but her gait, her posture, her carriage and the snippets of demeanor that seeped from her expressions without Carmilla actually engaging all testified to an explicit adjustment in the body that constituted Danny Lawrence. Carmilla entertained the notion, however briefly, that the injuries sustained from the fight were the source of Danny's difference. But then again… she was still Danny. Insufferable and courageously foolhardy, tromping out-of-doors after midnight by her lonesome, seeking out new demons to exorcise so Silas could operate sans hysterics for one day more.

“Danny,” Carmilla had whispered barely a month ago, that early April morning in the stone garden outside the architecture pavilion.

Danny cast a quick glance over her shoulder, blinked twice, then placed her index finger against her lips. She rotated on the balls of her feet and drew her bow with silent grace, the arrow whizzing past Carmilla’s shoulder in a vector of lethal precision.

There was a shriek, and then a thud, but Carmilla didn’t turn to look behind her.

She instead concentrated on Danny, Danny Lawrence, twenty-three years old and yet older, somehow, with this change. This… burden? Danny held the bow aloft and pursed her lips as the starlight faded and the sun breached the horizon, a misty softness settling over the gray of the stone habitat. Danny, who was once so bold, all crimson fury and bronze righteousness and purple heart and Kelly green adventure and royal blue indignation, who was now… very much subdued. Still brave, still doggedly pursuing a wily justice, but tempered by a maturity, a concession, that Carmilla couldn’t articulate. Her spectrumed colors were no longer visible, but she still shone with the qualities that had informed her, those characteristics Laura had once found so beguiling. She was smoother though, crisper and tidier, filled with radiant purpose against the misty neutrals of Silas stone.

Like metallic quicksilver, without its mercurial nature. Shimmery. Glimmering. Iridescent and imposing at a hazy daybreak.

“A successful hunt?” Carmilla had inquired, invested only because her boredom was getting the better of her. Or so she told herself.

“Something like that,” Danny had replied, lowering her bow. She crossed toward the center of the pavilion, picking up the quiver leaning against the wall of the broken fountain. “Can’t very well have Gjengangers running rampant. I’m just doing my part.”

“Part? You make it sound as if this place was once whole.”

“Just because it wasn’t for us, doesn’t mean it can’t be for others,” Danny replied soberly. “I’ve given several years of my life to this campus, years to its… people. Seems sort of irreverent to let it go to hell just because they’re not here anymore.”

“And so the Red Knight takes up her mantle, mounts her steed, and rides off into solitary combat? How classic. How romantic. How… pointless.”

Danny didn’t rise to the bait, though Carmilla had wished she would. She’d thrown the barb with the intent to argue, to verbally tear and shred. It would feel good, Carmilla had believed, to bicker and seethe and… and feel again. (Carmilla realized, much later, that she’d not spoken to anyone in five weeks, and wondered just what it was about the infuriating woman with a death wish that inspired her to do so).

“I hope you’ve been keeping well, Carmilla,” Danny had answered, guileless. “But I’ve got an exam to proctor in a few hours, so I better get going.”

“You don’t sleep anymore!” Carmilla accused. “Just what are you trying to do here, Xena? You seek out trouble for what? Shits and giggles? Tapping on the door to the afterlife just to join Lau—them. If you keep up this absurd crusade it’ll happen sooner rather than later.”

Danny hadn’t responded immediately; just stooped to the ground and slung a rucksack filled with gods knew what over her shoulder; hiked over cobble stones with moss growing in the crevices; placed a patient hand over one of the stone columns, as if feeling for a pulse; and then disarmed Carmilla further with some infuriatingly ambiguous response.

“You don’t have to worry so much, you know. Following me like you do. I… I know exactly what I’m doing.”

And Danny had walked away into the dawning mist, leaving Carmilla with a rankling suspicion that curdled in her blood-filled gut.

_Do you?_

She had wanted to ask her then.

Carmilla watched Danny walk away and teetered between exasperated and concerned.

The vampire was not wholly comfortable with either feeling.

 

* * *

 

 

So it shouldn’t have surprised Carmilla that Danny had missed her own graduation. But it had surprised Perry, apparently, since she was presently elbowing through a sea of proud parental figures with a furrowed brow and huffy discontent painted over her features. Carmilla waited a beat longer, just to make sure she nor Perry had skipped over the flame-topped colossus.

One more sweep over the floppy hats and tassels to no avail; and then Carmilla was running. Not for any real reason, she just needed the momentum to fling herself from the top of the engineering building and poof out of existence. And in the nonspace between air and soil she shifted with ease, reemerging into the physical world as a leopard with razor teeth and a coat of sable.

_Black as the Pit, and terrible as a demon, was Bagheera…_

The Silas campus had seen its fair share of extensions over the years, but even so, it wasn’t a particularly large university when it came down to the bare bones of acreage. Especially for a supernatural beast with eyes sharper than a falcon’s. Carmilla loped freely across the grounds since the majority of students and visitors were at the commencement ceremony. And if a stray pedestrian did catch a glimpse of her panther form and proceeded to freak, well, they probably weren’t cut out for a university like Silas anyway.

Stealth returned when she breached the threshold of the Summer Soc house. Those ladies weren’t afraid to set booby-traps when they left the property unattended. She poofed into Danny’s room, human once more, and was taken slightly aback by its barrenness.

Carmilla had become familiar with the organized knick-knackery of the room on her one night here, back during the immediate aftermath of the battle. That one night where nothing—something—but really, nothing, had occurred.

That one night that had become two nights, had become three weeks. At least until Danny’s bruises had healed and the worst of her nightmarish tremors had subsided. Danny could finally write again, grunting over the limitations her cumbersome wrist brace imposed. Carmilla would watch over the top of her book, how Danny would pinch her brows together (though not her face, not bunched-up in Laura’s disgruntled fashion) when grading papers with that bleeding red pen. There was precision in Danny’s room, a place for everything, Spartan in its orderliness, color-coded sticky notes on cork boards and highlighted day planners and two throw pillows, arranged just-so for maximum back support. Danny didn’t ask questions, not about how long Carmilla planned to stay, not about where she would go, not about the places she frequented on her nocturnal constitutionals. Danny accepted Carmilla’s presence as another room ornament; Danny would nod when she schlepped in after the end of a class, or a practice, and went about her business with little chit-chat. They did talk some...occasionally. Danny seemed interested in her past; Carmilla in Danny’s future. But Carmilla never told Danny that.

It became regular and comfortable much too quickly.

Danny had gone out to class one day and mentioned stopping by the diner to pick up some lunch, maybe a slice of pie. Then she’d asked if Carmilla wanted anything, because if she did, she’d need to cough up some cash.

Danny wasn’t even offering to buy her lunch.

She didn’t ask Carmilla to accompany her.

But the general expectation that Carmilla would still be in the Summer Soc house upon Danny’s return had set something into motion in Carmilla’s mind, and it hadn’t gelled well with the pretense of indifference she’d worked so hard to maintain.

Carmilla had packed that day and hadn’t returned.

Until now.

To an empty dorm room with utilitarian furnishings, relatively clean save for the wayward tracks of ink and lead on the desk, leftovers from exuberant grading sessions. Of course she’d be leaving, packed up and moving away. Carmilla had just gone to the Silas _graduation_. It was silly to be so surprised over the blankness of move-out day. Danny would be off celebrating with family or her Summer Sisters.

Danny had done it, Carmilla thought grimly. She’d _survived_. And now she’d never have to set foot on this gods-forsaken campus with its aqueducts of blood, tears, and regrets. Never feel responsible for the throngs of fools who saw fit to check the ‘I accept’ box printed on the admissions letter. Never have to worry about ravenous zombies, or vendetta-driven sorcerers, or ancient murderesses masquerading as administration heads. Danny was free to walk away. Let somebody else do the fighting for once.

…

…

…

Which didn’t sound like the Gingersnap at all.

“Dammit,” Carmilla grumbled to herself, and poofed toward the most southerly end of the campus.

The woods were thick with bursting summer foliage, all emerald and earth. Ferns and trees curved around the cleared land and off toward the west, a demarcated edge of leaf and trunk sprouting between Silas academics and Styrian wilderness. Carmilla decided to loop the perimeter, to avoid families and graduates, and make a passing attempt at finding that damned Amazonian martyr. Because if Danny intended to do what Carmilla thought… well, Carmilla had already seen Laura throw her life away. The cause wasn’t lost, not in Laura’s case: the casualties were exorbitant but there wouldn’t be anymore disappearances occurring every twenty years. Thanks to Laura.

But the price, no matter the outcome, had been too high. And Danny—god, the imbecile, that fucking noble Danny Lawrence—wanted to hurl herself headlong into a pact signed in blood and the residue of her human existence.

That is, if Carmilla had translated the ceremonial practices correctly. Her Sumerian was still a bit rusty.

Call it vampire intuition or heightened leopard senses, but it didn’t take long to catch Danny’s scent. Carmilla flicked out a sandpaper tongue and tasted it— _blood_ —that metallic twang with the consistency of hot cream. She ran, spurred by… something, _something_ , that mutual, unnameable feeling she shared with the Gingersnap that was shrouded by acerbic retorts and passive-aggressive sighs. It unnerved her, disturbed her, that further sacrifice seemed necessary.

Hadn’t they paid enough? Hadn’t the light been sated? What right did Silas have to claim another?

Air currents took her on a downwind detour, such that she had to circle back around a cavalcade of exuberant grads, posed for pictures in front of the graffitied Pegasus statue in front of the animal husbandry building. She circled closer to the center of campus, Danny’s scent fading and then surging on the breeze. Carmilla thought Danny would go to the perimeter, to the outskirts in order to perform the rites, to be canonized as Silas’s anonymous protector. But the stone archway reeked of redhead, and loomed before her beast-form at the geographic center of the campus: the bullseye, the target, the very heart of Silas, with hanging vines crawling over stone columns like stringy verdant chordae, curtaining off the interior of the pavilion from unsuspecting passersby.

Carmilla should have known, a month ago, when Danny had placed her callused hand against the stone.

_I could have done something._

Carmilla burst through a sheath of tangled vines, batting at blooming golden trumpets with padded paws, twitching her whiskers as leaves and pollen settled on her muzzle. She snorted, wiped a paw over her face.

Danny started, turning from the stagnant fountain at the center of the pavilion.

She extended a wicked knife of burnished steel, and waited.

“What are you doing?” Danny asked.

Carmilla paced, back and forth, fur bristling down the length of her spine, a backbone of upturned needles.

“Your judgmental face is harder to conceal when you’re being a pussy,” Danny quipped, turning back toward the fountain.

Carmilla growled, low and resonant; the sound seemed to shudder against the stones.

Danny grasped the etched hilt of the knife in her right and placed the blade in her left. She clenched her jaw and let out a whistling breath, sibilant air squeezing between the spaces of her teeth. Before she could squeeze and slice, Carmilla leapt, knocking Danny to the ground. The knife clattered over the stones and Danny groped for it, but Carmilla’s paws on her shoulders held her fast.

Carmilla roared, angry and feral and balmy against her face.

_How dare you throw your life away after Laura fought for you!_

She pressed harder with her paws, grinding Danny’s scapulas into the concentric bricks below. She bared her teeth, glared with demonic yellow eyes, baritone growls of feline frustration blasted over freckled cheeks.

_How dare you leave me, too!_

“Get the fuck off of me!”

Carmilla pressed harder.

“I swear, Carmilla, don’t make me make a fool of you—”

Carmilla sank the tips of pointed claws into the tops of Danny’s shoulders and hissed.

“Fine, you asked for it.”

Danny let her upper body go limp for a split second, and then Carmilla felt the giantess’s abdominals clench. She waited for a punch to the jugular, but balked as her haunches were kicked out from underneath her and she was jettisoned, three feet in the air, cartwheeling head over paws in an arc of affronted fur. She landed hard, so hard the air might have puffed from her lungs had inspiration been necessary in her animal form. She curled to her side and began the change, bones shifting from joints and organs boiling into a separate anatomy, claws retracting into painted black nails and velveteen skin melting into hairless porcelain. She shot up from the ground just in time to see Danny, back at the well, knife poised over her palm.

“Wait!” Carmilla shouted.

“WHAT?” Danny yelled back.

“You can’t just—I didn’t think….” Carmilla shook her head and shrugged, pounded a clenched fist into the stony ground. “How the hell did you do that?”

Danny quirked the slightest of grins, relaxing under Carmilla’s bewildered scrutiny.

“You wouldn’t believe me.”

“Try me.”

“Brody showed me.”

“Brody? The Zeta puppy with the I.Q. of a sea-slug?”

“Yeah,” the corner of Danny’s lip settled back into place. “His favorite movie was _The Lion King_.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

Danny opened her mouth, then closed it, then opened it again, the flat of her tongue touching the back of her teeth, her lips pursing and then relaxing in a flustering exercise of unforthcoming speech.

“It’s not important,” Danny said.

“Danny—”

“You know, for someone who keeps insisting she isn’t the hero, you sure do try and save people a lot.”

“You don’t understand the implications of blood sacrifice, however minimal. The binding spell will tie you, eternally—”

“I may not be fluent in Sumerian, but I got the gist of the French translation. It’s okay Carmilla, I told you I knew what I was doing.”

“No one has ever performed the ritual at Silas,” Carmilla argued.

“Maybe that’s why all the creepy shit keeps cropping up,” Danny retorted.

“You really want this?” Carmilla snarked. “You want to be tied to this… this _place_ , for eons? Laura _died_ here, LaF and Kirsch _died_ here, and you want to stick around for some twisted, self-imposed misery?”

“Careful Dead Girl, you’re projecting,” Danny smirked.

“Dammit, _why_ haven’t I killed you yet?!”

Danny crossed her arms over her chest, toed a pebble with her Converse. The glittering tip of the ceremonial knife winked from under her armpit, mocking Carmilla and her rejecting warnings.

“I’ve asked myself that a couple’a times,” Danny said. “And honestly, I think we like each other a little more than either of us are willing to admit. Not because we get on particularly well, or because we’ve got all that much in common. Just… shared tragedies, you know?”

“Yes, well, becoming immortal practically ensures your role as witness to tragedies. Hard to skip over them when you live so long. Are you sure you’re ready to give that up? To sacrifice your humanity? You’d never get to leave here, you would be bound, forever—”

“And the moment I step beyond the bounds of Silas my skeleton turns to ash and my soul drifts listlessly on fickle winds until oblivion consumes the earth, yada yada yada—”

“Stop being so flip!” Carmilla seethes. “Why do you insist on throwing away everything Laura fought for?”

“Throwing it away?” Danny asked, pinching her brows together in a fashion that Carmilla should not recognize as familiar. “You think this is me throwing her… her memory, her legacy away?”

“What else do you call killing yourself?”

“You just shut up for point-two seconds, okay Dead Girl?” Danny directed, and raised an accusing finger. “First off, pot, stop calling this kettle black. I recall a stake pressed in my very unwilling hands about six months ago, and a sappy line about a mercy killing. So you have no right,” Danny fumed, stalking toward Carmilla.

She towered over the bereft vampire, beautific, ethereal righteousness rolling off of her broad shoulders.

“And secondly? I’m not throwing away Laura’s… memory, or sacrifice. Or her quest to keep this place safe. If anything, I’m… I want to continue it, for as long as I can. I’m contributing in the only way I know how! I love this place. And I loved my friends. And I love that they loved this place just as much as I did, that they fought for it just like I want to! They protected people, and now it’s my turn. And if that means giving up my humanity, for loving this place and for loving them too much, then… maybe that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.”

“Danny, just listen—”

“Don’t, Carmilla. It’s already started. It started the second Laura turned on her camera. It’s just taken this long for the enchantment to progress. This little cut is practically a formality.”

Carmilla plopped down gracelessly onto the lip of the fountain and picked at her nails. Marveled at a change in scent she hadn’t recognized until this moment, until Danny had confirmed her suspicions (her fears). Wondered how, and more importantly, _why_ , she had been placed in the path of humans with unwavering resolve. Into the path of people who were so much braver, so much better than she was… a long and broken path where she felt as if she were being flattened by a steam roller every time one of the fragile mortals did something astounding.

Like LaF, clawing at one of her mother’s minions as the pair of them pitched over the side of the pit.

Like Kirsch, slinging strike after furious strike when he saw Danny in her mother’s choke hold.

Like Laura, blessed, eager Laura, spitting in her mother’s face on Carmilla’s behalf and standing up despite the weight of her own impending death.

_Some things are more important than whether you can win._

“There’s no way you’ll accomplish anything here,” Carmilla mumbled, already knowing Danny’s response. “Even with immortality, you’re not infallible. You won’t die naturally, but you can be killed, in brutal, gruesome violence that will make the battle with my mother seem like a water balloon fight. You will wretch and wither in pain so severe you’ll want to pass out, if you go up against even the least dangerous of what I know lurks these grounds.”

“But I still get to be really badass, right?” Danny said lightly, a disembodied voice on the wind. “And do enough damage to the other side to make a difference.”

_But sometimes you stand up anyway._

“There’s nothing I can say to stop you, is there?” Carmilla asked, gaze drifting to the algae atop the pond sludge.

“Don’t think so,” Danny mumbled, shuffling closer to the fountain edge. “But hey, if you ever feel like visiting, once every decade or so, could you bring me a slice of pie from the diner on fifth street? I’m really going to miss that place.”

“ _That’s_ what you’re going to miss?” Carmilla asked. “Pie?”

“It’s really good pie,” Danny defended.

“I’ll have to take your word for it. Not quite my go-to snack.”

“Yeah, pie is definitely different than… cupcakes.”

…

…

…

Carmilla finally looked up, and cast a dubious glance at Danny’s silhouette. The redhead had a death grip on the blade in her left hand, skin puckering over the miniscule cut already forming along the life line in her palm. Danny’s right hand was shaking so severely she could hardly hold the knife properly. Crimson didn’t pour from her hand; instead, drops of wet silver slipped down her wrist and congealed against her shirtsleeve, liquid steel from a body in the final stages of supernatural modifications.

“But it can’t be all that bad, right?” Danny’s voice broke a little, eyes shimmery from stubbornly unshed tears.

“No I—” Carmilla stood quickly, placed hesitant fingers over Danny’s shaking ones. Steadied them. “—that is… well, once in a blue moon, I suppose. Pie is… pie’s alright.”

Danny inhaled, and Carmilla heard the breath rattle in her lungs.

“Carmilla, you—I mean, you wouldn’t have to but I think… immortality. I bet it gets kinda lonely, huh?”

…

…

…

“Yes,” Carmilla confessed. “Sometimes… sometimes all the time.”

“Well if you ever got bored or… I mean, it’s never dull here, is it?” Danny gave her a watery smile.

“Everything but dull, really.”

“It… I mean, you can go, you _should_ go. There will be so much to see, but if you ever needed like, a homebase or something. Just to store your books—”

“Danny—”

“I mean, a super-strong black panther. I could use one of those. Especially if that Jackalope infestation is more reality than rumor. And you throw a pretty good punch.”

“Danny, I’ll—”

“Would you want to—”

“-stay.”

“-stay?”

“You’d—”

“Yes. I’d like to—”

“Thanks. That's really—”

“Well…” Carmilla trailed off, turning her attention back to Danny's shaking hands.

“Now that that's settled... no more stalling,” Danny mumbled, and sliced the lifeline from her left palm. “Ahhh!”

Carmilla saw the slick silver bubbling over the wounded gash on Danny’s hand, drops of now-immortal blood sprinkling the tops of spongy water moss. The gloppy fountain water began churning, bubbling, just like Danny’s wound. The silver of Danny’s blood seeped into the algae and spread, overrunning the staleness, overtaking the putrefaction and refining it. The liquid faded from opaque silver to pristine clarity, a tiny current swirling a whirlpool around the gushing statue at center.

There hadn't been a statue at the center of the fountain three seconds ago.

“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me,” Danny muttered, face falling as she stared at the stone archer crouched atop a pedestal in the fountain. 

“Ha!” Carmilla exclaimed, clapping her hands together. “You’ve certainly done it now.”

“But come on! This is a little… much.”

“Eternal binding spell, protectorate of the grounds… immortalized in rock.”

“Won’t someone… recognize me?”

“You’ve only got about three years to worry over that,” Carmilla said.

“Three years?”

“The blink of an eye, in the long run.”

“Yeah… yeah sure.”

“You… having second thoughts, Gingersnap?”

“Nah,” Danny shrugged, staring up at her carved likeness. "Guess I've got a lot to live up to, now."

“Do you feel… differently? Changed, or… something?”

“Surprisingly no.”

“Hmm,” Carmilla murmured, eyeing the tracks of blood dribbling down Danny’s fingers.

“I wonder how I can tell if it worked—HEY!”

Carmilla released Danny’s hand and spat on the ground, wiping her chin of silvery residue. Danny’s blood was now so cold it reminded Carmilla of ice cream, if ice cream tasted like body odor, anchovies and arsenic.

“Eeughuuck,” Carmilla hacked again, tidying up the spittle from around her lips. “Definitely not human.”

“ _Don’t_ do that again.”

Carmilla held up a hand. “Don’t fret, Red. Your blood tastes worse than that sludge you just decontaminated.”

An ear-piercing squeal sounded from beyond the curtained ivy, followed by a chorus of high-pitched chittering. And then, the unmistakable thudding of a human stampede, rumbling the ground beneath them.

"What the..."

...

...

...

“Jackalopes, you said?” Carmilla asked.

“Supposedly.”

“And because of the commencement ceremony, there's double the amount of people here.”

“Yep."

“Are they carnivorous?”

“No idea.”

“Ready to start your job, Protector?”

“They don’t really give a girl time to adjust, you know? I mean, I could very well be living to the year 3,000. I might get to see flying cars, the trip to Mars, scientists might even find the Leviathan—”

Another screech, louder this time. And nearer.

“You’ll have plenty of time to mull it over,” Carmilla said, stalking toward the perimeter of the pavilion. She pulled back the curtained vines and saluted, shoulders rolling as she felt her spine curve and her nails thicken. “See you—”

“—at the violence, yeah, yeah. It’s like a catchphrase at this point.”

“Xena!” Carmilla yelled, and then shifted into her panther form. She growled, then sprinted off after the horde of mutated bunnies.

“You’re welcome, Dead Girl,” Danny smiled, and slipped the knife into her waistband. "Now where can I get my hands on that Holy Hand Grenade?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ending on a significantly lighter note, taking a different spin on the song source. Because I really can't contain the camp when writing Silas. Thanks for reading, and feedback appreciated!


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